Nine Years of Sobriety

 Nine years ago today, facing the imminent passing of my father (two weeks later) and charges of a second OUI, I walked into my attorney’s office and promptly declared that I had had enough. “I’m done, I uttered…..I’ve had my last drink”. I had decided that This was my rock-bottom. And to add insult to injury, my attorney proceeded to laugh in my face. A second OUI and nine years of sobriety later, that dumb SOB of an attorney is 0-2.

One of the most difficult parts of recovery is learning to accept that which has transpired and perhaps more importantly, accepting that it cannot be changed. It’s done. Its history. What becomes clear throughout this journey is that cessation of the substance(s) of choice is merely the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Then comes the real heavy lifting that includes dealing with the emotional and psychological carnage left in its wake. It took me a little over 12 years to get a hang of the drinking cessation part. And probably about just as long to stop the incessant cycle of rumination that allows one to reallocate energy towards moving the recovery process forward. Slowly but surely, over a decade plus of retraining my mind to focus more on the future than the past, one of the most enlightening and empowering processes that this world will ever know takes place. One begins to make sense of why things happened the way that they did and the self-loathing slowly grinds to a halt. The breadth of perspective gleaned by staring your rock bottom in the eye during the throes of addiction and then recovering is an absolute super-power of a gift that so few of us get to experience. It takes the pain of having a hole blasted through your very soul for the most intense light imaginable to one-day shine through, unabated and undeterred. And this is something that is not at all readily apparent until the dust has settled.

It took me several years to forgive myself for not having the strength to afford my father the gift of witnessing my personal transformation. Instead, I had to settle for promising him that I’d “bounce back”, as I gripped his hand for one of the final times. Twenty days later that process began, when I was convicted of my second OUI in the very same court in which he had been such a prominent figure for so many years. The irony is that at the time, I had never felt so unlike him. But it was only years later, when I could view life through the lens of one privy to the pain of losing those whom you have taken for granted for so long that I understood. My father became the man that he was because he had independently overcome so much adversity in his life. And for the first time in my life, I had to stand on my own two feet. That was the very first moment that I had actually began to resemble him. For the first time in my life, I had to face the consequences for my actions.

All these years later, when he reflect back on my journey through recovery, I have been able to reconcile the differences between how things actually happened and how I would have liked for them to have happened. Losing my father when I did fortified my recovery with the highest power imaginable. It takes an extraordinary human-being to empower someone after they leave this world, and that is what I have decided that my father did nine years ago. I know full well that one of the most pressing issues on his mind as he breathed his last breath was whether or not I would be okay. And the least I could do for him was to give him that. He may have passed nine years ago, but to me he is immortal because I'm reminded of him with each additional day of sobriety, and each time I hold one of my children as a testament to what this experience has made possible for me. See, the thing about addiction is that as long as your heart still beats, you still have a pulse and air in your lungs; you are empowered with the pen to write one hell of a script for the rest of your life. YOU can rewrite the narrative. Compelling stories are replete with adversity and nobody but you can write this ending.

Happy nine years to me-